Golden American Beauties

The United States of America team currently competing in Beijing, China at the XXIX Olympiad has given much attention to its men. Michael Phelps is a swimming machine who is about to break every Olympic swim record ever held, currently having won 6 gold medals while setting records each time. The men's basketball team is an NBA star-studded bunch led by Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, LeBron James and others, and it is on a mission to not stub its toe the way US men's basketball squads of the recent past have done. But it is the exploits, and frankly the good looks, of a trio of U.S. women that has captured this sports fans attention. Darra Torres is an American swimmer who has already won a silver medal in these games as a member of the Women's 400m Freestyle Relay squad. A silver medalist on a relay team. What's the big deal, you may say? Well, Darra Torres is also the 41-year old mother of a two year old little girl. That's right, 41-years old. The relay silver was her 10th Olympic medal won during her career, the first of which she won at the Los Angeles games...in 1984! Two years earlier, at age 14, she had set her first world record. Now over two decades later, she continues to win medals, and is the favorite this weekend in a 50m sprint freestyle race. Darra is just five years younger than me, and let me tell you that my bones are already creaking and my muscles popping just getting up in the morning. But Darra Torres is not your typical 41-year old. The woman has one of the most incredible, sexy physiques that you are ever going to see on a woman of any age. She is in better shape than most athletes two decades younger. The odds are that you are seeing her at her final Olympiad, so if you haven't caught her act, look her up this weekend. Meanwhile in the sand of the Women's Beach Volleyball contests, perhaps the most unbeatable American women in this entire Olympiad are competing for the gold this weekend as well, and looking good while doing it. Kerry Walsh (foreground in pic) and Misty May-Treanor (background) are a dynamic 'Mutt-n-Jeff' team that lays waste to their competition the higher that competition level gets. They were pushed yesterday by a suddenly strong Norwegian pair, and were down set-point a handful of times in the first set. But Walsh/May-Treanor never let up, and the golden gals pulled out a 24-22 victory. They went on to stomp the Norwegian gals in the 2nd set to advance on towards the medal round, helping make Walsh's 30th birthday a happy affair. Kerry Walsh, the tall, slender blond of the pair, began her Olympic career back in 2000 at Sydney as a member of the USA women's indoor team that finished in 4th place. For the 2004 games she moved outdoors to the beach with the then-Misty May, and the duo swept to the gold medal in Athens without losing a set, becoming the first American females to win the event. The pair entered these '08 Olympics on a 101-match win streak, and having won 18 straight tournaments. They are the favorites in Beijing and the defending world champions. Misty May-Treanor, the shorter, athletic, fireplug of the team has been called arguably the greatest female beach volleyballer of all-time, having won 102 beach volleyball titles in her career, the most by anyone ever. Her father was an Olympic volleyball team member in 1968, her mom played tennis at UCLA, and her cousin Taylor Dent was a pro tennis player and a member of the Athens US Olympic team, so Misty May comes to her athleticism through genealogy as well as hard work. All that, and she married Florida Marlins backup catcher Mark Treanor as well. Some feminazis would blanch at references to the sexuality and attractiveness of women athletes like Torres, Walsh, and May-Treanor, but I could care less about their opinion of my opinions. Like the vast majority of American males, while I appreciate strong athletic performances from all of our fellow country-persons, a woman's physical attractiveness elevates the interest in her. Darra Torres, Kerry Walsh, and Misty May-Treanor should elicit a great deal of such interest this coming weekend. This is one red-blooded American male who will be rooting hard for these three American beauties to bring home the gold, and look good while doing it.

Islamism Series: The Olympics

This is the continuation of my regular feature
'Islamism Series'. At the bottom of this entry, you can click on the label of that name to read the prior entries.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics began yesterday with the Opening Ceremony, and will continue on through August 24th. For the next two and a half weeks, the athletic dramas of this Olympiad will play out under it's theme "One World, One Dream". But as we have learned in previous installments of the 'Islamism Series', the radical Islamofascists have their own vision of 'One world, one dream' that runs counter to that on display this month in China. The radical Islamists want the world united as one Caliphate under the banner of Islam, run by the Caliph, with everyone either believing in or subjecting themselves to the rule of the Islamists. To this end, every major event held around the world becomes a tempting target for them to flex their muscles, to show that they can and will influence world events by inserting their violent vision into the proceedings if allowed. Particularly since 9/11, every major public event has properly seen a dramatic increase in the scope and cost of the security surrounding those events. From the Super Bowl to political conventions, and everything in between, security is stepped up, and convenience and personal liberties are sacrificed thanks to the terrorists of Islamofascism. Already there have been threats and plots against these Olympics. In an attack that the Washington Post described as being done only by the "ethnic Uighur minority", these terrorists killed 16 police officers and injured dozens of others this week by driving a dump truck into a group of officers who were out for a training jog, then tossing grenades into the police compound. This 'ethnic minority' is Islamic, by the way. The mass media has once again buried this fact from your knowledge under their banner of political correctness. The Uighur militant Islamic group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party released a video coinciding with the Olympics Opening Ceremony in which they showed a burning Olympic logo, an image of one of the Olympic venues exploding, and which included a warning to all Muslims to stay away from Olympic and Beijing-area venues. Among the warnings were calls for Muslims to avoid taking public transportation, and pleas for Muslim peoples to not allow their athletes to attend the games. According to a report by the Bloomberg news organization, China has deployed a 100,000-person strong anti-terror unit for the Olympics, and equipment that includes fighter jets, helicopters, naval vessels, and even anti-aircraft launchers at the main Olympic stadium. Back in January, Chinese officials uncovered a plot to attack the Olympics and confiscated "guns, homemade bombs, training materials and extremist religious ideological materials" during a raid that resulted in the death of two terrorists and arrest of a dozen and a half more. The Chinese government is Communist, and politically repressive, so the show that they are putting on this month with the Olympiad largely masks a host of human-rights problems that should make opponents of America's detainee policy at Guantanamo Bay cringe. But all that the Radical Islamists want is to replace one repressive regime with another, simply changing the ideology from Communism to Islamofascism. So while you are watching the basketball, soccer, track & field, swimming, diving, volleyball, baseball, gymnastics, boxing and other incredible displays of athleticism, and while your chest swells with pride over emerging American Olympic heroes and other human interest stories that emerge, there is another side. Behind the scenes, hundreds of thousands of Chinese and others are working long and hard in an attempt to secure these Olympics from terrorist attacks that have been and are being plotted. Let's wish them the best in that effort against the radical, terrorist Islamists.